Reviewed By Liz

I have been hanging out at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio while my father had open heart surgery and a kidney removed. Which wasn’t tremendously enjoyable for any of us, but had a good outcome. He was released today and has a long recovery ahead of him, but is doing well. I expect he will have a lot of time to read and will hopefully be up to doing some more classic mystery reviews.

I was several books ahead on my reviews, so you may not have even noticed that I was gone. I need to get back in the groove but have a few non-review goodies for you in the meantime.

I apologize for the sporadic posts of the last week. When we set up this blog, we knew we might be going on vacation in January and decided not to advertise our presence until we were back, but you found us anyway and might be missing us. But I have taken a dozen or more mysteries with me and hope to read and review them all in the next few days. Look for new reviews beginning January 22nd.

In the meantime, please feel free to respond to this post with any thoughts you might have on our existing reviews, lists of your favorite authors, or questions. When we return we hope to expand our readership and dialog on the world of mysteries. I am hoping to persuade both of my parents to write some reviews for us – voracious readers are not born in vacuums, I was trained by my parents who are great lovers of books.

My mother has been a huge supporter of our local libraries here in Michigan and, having served on many Friends of the Library committees and local and regional library boards, went back to school to earn her MLS degree and is now a librarian for the Kent District Library. My father is the member of our family with the encyclopedic memory of classic mysteries and I am hoping to persuade him to disgorge some of the knowledge he carries around with him.

Until we return, read good books!

Take care,

Liz and Bob

When we discovered that people were finding our site before we had really hung out our shingle, we wrote a lovely little message encouraging our unexpected and farflung readers (hello Turkey!) to leave comments. Well, we are new at this and didn’t realize we had to flip that little virtual switch that enabled you to do this. So we finally figured it out and you can now leave comments.

Go ahead, do it now. I dare you.

And for those of you who are always looking ahead, the next reviews will be for Keeper of the Keys by Perri O’Shaughnessy, The Bookwoman’s Last Fling by John Dunning, and The Case of the Roasted Onion by Claudia Bishop.

Ever get to a party and find the hostess running around frantically in her underwear, not quite ready for guests? I feel a little like that hostess. You see, we hadn’t planned on “launching” Reviewed by Liz until January or so, when we would have a few more reviews. So we have been posting reviews, tinkering with the graphics and tools, but not linking to anyone or advertising what we are doing over here.

So you could have knocked us over with a feather when we looked up our page statistics and discovered that people have discovered our site. Several people from all corners of the globe have been watching while we twiddle switches and generally goof off here. So we figured we had better say hello. Hello! And welcome. Since several of you have been watching us for a while now, you know that this is a work in progress. But we are surprised and delighted that you have already found us and we would love to hear from you.

I’ll start. I’m Liz. My husband Bob, daughter Emily and I all live in Michigan and we are gearing up for a long, cold winter full of good books. I am picking up eight or so from the library today, including two I am really looking forward to. – Death Without Company by Craig Johnson and The Bookwoman’s Last Fling by John Dunning.

Dunning has written a short series of books about Cliff Janeway, a used book dealer, that are really good and tremendously informative. And I read Johnson’s first book last year and about laughed my you-know-what off. Absolutely hysterical writing mixed with a good plot and super characters. Hopefully, these gentlemen will have kept up the good work they have done in the past.

At the moment, I am reading Death on a Silver Platter by Ellen Hart and Summer Garden Mystery by Ann Ripley. Neither have really grabbed me yet, but I’m not very far into either of them.

What are you reading today? Please feel free to jump in on any post with comments, questions, or even requests. We look forward to hearing from you!

Mystery Book Reviews by Reviewed By Liz.com ©2006

Don’t miss Malice Domestic’s annual Washington, D.C. based convention May 4th through 6th 2007.

Established in 1989, Malice Domestic® is an annual convention in metropolitan Washington, D.C., saluting the traditional mystery–books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie.

According to the Malice Domestic web site, the genre is loosely defined as mysteries which contain no explicit sex or excessive gore or violence; and usually (but are not limited to) featuring an amateur detective, a confined setting, and characters who know one another.

They are expecting more than 175 authors to attend, including:

Lori Avocato, Frankie Y. Bailey, Deb Baker, Lorraine Bartlett, John Betancourt, Dorothy Cannell, Lillian Stewart Carl, Jane K. Cleland, Carla K. Coupe, Barbara D’Amato, Carole Nelson Douglas, Kathy Lynn Emerson, Honora Finkelstein,

Eileen Friars, Jack Getze, Hal Glatzer, Barb Goffman, Kate Grilley, Beth Groundwater, Parnell Hall, Karen Harper, Carolyn Hart, Betty Jacobson Hechtman, Sue Henry, Mary Ellen Hughes, Toni LP Kelner, Diana Killian,
Rita Lakin, Vicki Lane, Jess Lourey, Karen MacInerney, Annette Mahon,

Margaret Maron, Priscilla Masters, Alex Matthews, Bonner Menking, Larry Mild, Rosemary Mild, Beverle Graves Myers, Katherine Hall Page, Ann Parker,
Sandra Parshall, Nancy Pickard, Cathy Pickens, Danuta Reah, Cynthia Riggs,

Chris Roerden, Janet Rogerson, Roberta Rogow, Marilyn Rothstein, Mary Saums, Maggie Sefton, Susan Smily, Alexandra Sokoloff, Patricia Sprinkle, JB Stanley, Verna Suit, Margaret Tessler, Gayle Wigglesworth, and Patricia Wynn.

For more information go to the Malice Domestic web site:

http://www.malicedomestic.org/